Data centers of remote network computing providers may house significant numbers of interconnected computing systems to provide computing resources to customers. Such data centers may provide network access, power, hardware resources (e.g., computing and storage), and secure installation facilities for hardware maintained by the data center, an organization, or by another third party.
To facilitate increased utilization of data center resources, virtualization technologies may allow a single physical computing machine to host one or more instances of virtual machines that appear and operate as independent computing machines to a connected computer user. With virtualization, the single physical computing device can create, maintain or delete virtual machines in a dynamic manner. In turn, users can request computing resources from a data center and utilize them in conjunction with virtual machine instances. Remote network computing providers generally strive to provide such resources with optimum levels of availability, convenience and security. More specifically, users may specify security protocols, such as encryption, for data maintained by a remote network computing provider on behalf of the user.